[Peace-discuss] Rumsfeld's Secret War

Mon Nov 4 22:30:33 CST 2002

Carl mentioned this in news of the week report at Sunday night's 
meeting.  i've appended the full text 27 Oct. 2002 LA Times article below.

To feed the habit of primary data addicts, the Defense Science Board 
powerpoint slides are available at - 
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsbbrief.ppt

The explicit recommendation (slide #26) is to "Develop an entirely new 
capability to proactively, premeptively evoke responses from 
adversary/terrorist groups".

i'm significantly less than enamored with the idea of 'evoking' a nuclear 
response from any terrorist group! Are they really so 
narrow-sighted/brainwashed by rhetoric of US invincibility to imagine that 
the responses evoked are only going to effect non-US interests?!?

See also http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd1101.html, November 1, 2002 Into 
the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Provoke Terrorist Attacks by CHRIS FLOYD

&

http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/stories/2002/11/01/120.html) The Moscow Times, 
Friday, Nov. 1, 2002. Page 3
Global Eye -- Into the Dark By Chris Floyd

http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin27oct27001451,0,7355676.story
The Secret War
Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically
expanding its 'black world' of covert operations
By William M. Arkin

William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for
Opinion. E-mail: warkin at igc.org
October 27 2002
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- In what may well be the largest expansion of covert
action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration
has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources
stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New
organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being
revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror
and monitoring the "axis of evil."
The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say,
reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the
performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much
of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire
of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of
the war on terror.
Insulated from outside pressures, armed with matchless weapons and
technology, trained to operate below the shadow line, the Pentagon's black
world of classified operations holds out the hope of swift, decisive action
in a struggle against terrorism that often looks more like a family feud
than a war.
Coupled with the enormous effort being made throughout the government to
improve and link information networks and databases, covert anti-terror
operations promise to put better information in the hands of streamlined
military teams that can identify, monitor and neutralize terrorist threats.
"Prevention and preemption are ... the only defense against terrorism,"
Rumsfeld said in May. "Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they
strike us."
The new apparatus for covert operations and the growing government secrecy
associated with the war on terrorism reflect the way the Bush
administration's most senior officials see today's world:
First, they see fighting terrorism and its challenge to U.S. interests and
values as the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War crusade against
communism. Second, they believe the magnitude of the threat requires, and
thus justifies, aggressive new "off-the-books" tactics.
In their understandable frustration over continued atrocities such as the
recent Bali attack, however, U.S. officials might keep two points in mind.
Though covert action can bring quick results, because it is isolated from
the normal review processes it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger
problems. Also, the Pentagon is every bit as capable as the civilian side of
the government when it comes to creating organization charts and bureaucracy
that stifle creative thinking and timely action.
The development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its
roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The Army created a highly
compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence
independent of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and follow
through with covert military action.
Known as the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, when it was established
in 1981, this unit fought in drug wars and counter-terror operations from
the Middle East to South America. It built a reputation for daring,
flexibility and a degree of lawlessness.
In May 1982, Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called the ISA
"uncoordinated and uncontrolled." Though its freelance tendencies were
curbed, the ISA continued to operate under different guises through the
ill-starred U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992 and was reportedly active in
the hunt for Bosnian Serbs suspected of war crimes.
Today, the ISA operates under the code name Gray Fox. In addition to covert
operations, it provides the war on terrorism with the kind of so-called
"close-in" signals monitoring -- including the interception of cell phone
conversations -- that helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Gray Fox's low-profile eavesdropping planes also fly without military
markings. Working closely with Special Forces and the CIA, Gray Fox also
places operatives inside hostile territory.
In and around Afghanistan, Gray Fox was part of a secret sphere that
included the CIA's paramilitary Special Activities Division and the
Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command.
These commands and "white" Special Forces like the Green Berets, as well as
Air Force combat controllers and commandos of eight different nations report
to a mind-boggling array of new command cells and coordination units set up
after Sept. 11.
An Army brigadier general commands the Joint Interagency Task Force at
Bagram air base north of Kabul to coordinate CIA, Defense Department and
coalition forces in Afghanistan. A new Campaign Support Group has been
established at Ft. Bragg, N.C. The Special Operations Joint Interagency
Collaboration Center has been created in Tampa, Fla.
In Europe, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group handles
information-sharing and logistical support with NATO. Hawaii's Pacific
Command stood up a Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorist Group this summer.
Meantime, old commands are being morphed into new ones for the covert war.
The two Joint Interagency Task Forces in the United States previously
devoted to fighting drugs now have the war on terrorism as their highest
priority.
The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North
Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta
Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to
exist. Its two-star commander, Army Maj. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, who spent much
of the Afghan war in Oman, has no public biography.
Among Dailey's assets is a fleet of aircraft specially equipped for secret
operations -- conventional and covert military planes and helicopters, and
even former Soviet helicopters. The bulk of those craft, including the
reconfigured Russian choppers, fly from airfields in Uzbekistan and from two
Pakistani air bases, Shahbaz and Shamsi.
The Air Force and the CIA collect additional intelligence from unmanned
Predator and Global Hawk drones. They also have low-profile reconnaissance
assets that look like transport planes and operate under such code names as
ARL-Low, Keen Sage, Scathe View and Senior Scout.
Not to be left out, the Navy's Gray Star spy vessel, reminiscent of the old
Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968, now sweeps up sophisticated -- and
obscure -- "measurements and signatures intelligence" to monitor the
ballistic missile capabilities of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Even with all this, the Pentagon wants to expand covert capabilities.
Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special
Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its
classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon
agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies,
postures and organization."
The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an
organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to
bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare,
intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at
"stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of
mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into
action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.
Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to
harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk," the briefing paper
declares.

Never to be outdone in proposing hardware solutions, the Air Force is
designing its own Global Response Task Force to fight the war on terrorism.
The all-seeing, all-bombing Air Force envisions unmanned A-X aircraft
capable of long-range, nighttime gunship operations and an M-X covert
transport, as well as hypersonic and space-based conventional weapons
capable of delivering a "worldwide attack within an hour."

Who says the arms race is over? Rumsfeld's science board warns against
overemphasis on equipment even as it recommends more. Washington is well on
its way to an arms race with itself.

And for those who worry that all these secret operations and aggressive new
doctrines will turn the United States into the world's policeman, there is a
ray of hope.

Rumsfeld is now the field marshal of the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon
is also creating new layers of bureaucracy that may save it from itself. Not
to mention the rest of us.
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